Sixteen years ago, teenage fossil-fossicker Karl Raubenheimer was scouring a beach at Waitoetoe near his home in Taranaki when he spotted a boulder with something strange sticking out. It was a fossilised crab claw, a truly humongous one. Using pneumatic air scribes and grinders, Raubenheimer cracked the stone open and a familiar shape—a huge male crab, in remarkable condition—began to emerge. Raubenheimer sent photographs of the find, as well as five further crab fossils from the same area, to Barry van Bakel, a palaeontologist and crab expert in the Netherlands, and Àlex Ossó, a palaeocarcin ..read more

Nature is queer in tooth and claw ..read more

There’s a dead end we run into again and again while documenting natural science in New Zealand—a wall of “We don’t know.” “Nobody’s working on that, sorry.” It floors me, the scale of what we simply do not know. I have always hoped that politicians are driven to base their decisions on evidence, and where it is lacking, to look closer. This month the government announced it would not renew the contract for the longitudinal study Growing Up in New Zealand, which was 16 years into a planned 21-year-plus run. (A second longitudinal study of our children, Living in Aotearoa, run by Stats NZ, has ..read more

SailGP wanted to run a yacht race in a marine mammal sanctuary. They made a plan in the event of dolphins swimming into the course. Dolphins happened. They stuck to the plan. The racing was wildly successful. Is it just me, or does this seem like a good outcome for New Zealand ..read more

An expedition to the Bounty Trough off the coast of Otago, which reaches five kilometres down, added bucketfuls of new species to science, from the slimy to the transparent ..read more

Modern vessels bristle with advanced navigation and communication equipment, and yet human activity in our seas is not well quantified, largely because the location data is shared privately rather than publicly, or not broadcast at all. This makes it hard to understand the impact of fishing, transport and energy sectors on the environment, and indeed on the expansion of the two trillion-dollar blue economy. To understand the movements of these “dark vessels”, researchers from Global Fishing Watch analysed two million gigabytes of satellite data using three deep-learning models to recognise fis ..read more

Our trees, through the steady lens of German photographer Dirk Nayhauss ..read more

This summer, New Zealand photographer Rob Suisted was working as a polar guide on a trip to Antarctica. Off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula the ship approached A23a—the largest iceberg in the world (for now). “You look at this thing and you can only see a fraction of it, both in its vastness and its depth. It just defies comprehension,” Suisted says. A23a is 280 metres thick, weighs a trillion tonnes, and sprawls across 3900 square kilometres—three-quarters the size of the entire Auckland region. When giants like this throw their weight around, they transform the surrounding seas: they ..read more

Mum and Dad’s first date was in a dinghy. As soon as my brothers and I could hold a handline they had us dangling for spotties off the Picton wharf. We adored it. The jostle for the best spot. The smell of sunscreen and squid bait. Tug. “A monster!” Mum and Dad would exclaim, as we pulled up fish no longer than a finger. Fishing brought its own list of firsts, little markers of independence: the first time you baited up a hook by yourself. The first time you grabbed hold of a flipping, spiky body, held it still, eased the hook out. First time you hooked yourself. As we got older, we hauled up ..read more

What you’re looking at is the story of an infection. Specifically, how the bacterium Citrobacter rodentium spread through hundreds of mice at the University of Auckland’s bioluminescent superbugs lab. The graphic above shows 10 transmission chains flinging out from a central hub—the original bacterium. The scientists are sure about these transmission chains because they carefully controlled the spread of the disease. To get things started, they inoculated 10 mice with the bacterium (which infects mice, but not humans). Then each of those mice were put in a cage with a healthy mouse. Mice groom ..read more